What is Rosebud

A number of years ago I started a New Years Resolution Plan called Rosebud. I heard about it on one of the travel podcasts that I follow. The process essentially looks like this:
Step 1: List Three Roses-
This is the stuff that I would consider the greatest strengths, successes or accomplishments of the past year, the stuff that has managed to blossom into a Rose.
Step 2: List One Thorn
This would reflect my greatest personal struggle of the past year.
Step 3: List Three Buds
Based on my “thorn”, this is a list of what I would like to “bud” into potential Roses in the coming year.
Step 4: Come up with a word for the year
Based on my three roses, this should be a single word that can help reflect the direction I want to head in the coming year, a single word that can give my year a theme or a recognizable focus and narrative.

Why Rosebud

I have been asked the question in the past, why three Roses but only one Thorn? It often goes unaware, but it tends to be much more diffciult to come up with roses than thorns. People, speaking in a fashion that I think has objective interest, tend to gravitate naturally towards a self critical and self depreciating view, whether we recognize it or not.

Equally difficult is learning how to speak about thorns in a way that imagines potential for growth. People also have a tendency to want to keep things in that self critical light, at least in part because to think otherwise leaves so much outside of our control. It’s kind of like that old piece of advice that says when you are in an interview for a new job and they ask you about your weaknesses, always give a weakness that you can do something about. More than this, forcing someone to give genuine thought to three Roses becomes a way of cultivating hope, even against our tendencies.

Another great part of the Rosebud system is also that it allows one to document their struggles and their growth year by year as a kind of working and interactive diary. You can build on the previous year and form an ongoing narrative that sets everything in conversation. This is not about resolutions persay, at least not in the traditional sense, it is about making space for introspection and observation and perspective. It gives someone a place to start from, not a script to follow or a to do list of accomplishments. And it allows one to not just make goals, but to examine what those goals are actual about, the why of our goals.

With that in mind…

Looking Back at Rosebud 2025

My three buds:

• Find a way to reoconfigure my current work situation into something with long term sustainability
• Take a first step in regaining agency and control, beginning with reclaiming this blogspace as an important part of my ability to process.
• Reclaim time and routine, beginning with getting rid of certain social media presences which have allowed me to escape the weight of my anxieties

Reflection:

It’s interesting to look back on where things were a year ago. There has been a lot of changes, especially where it concerns my work situaiton. In my summary of the three buds and my one thorn (which was the inability to control my anxiety) I noted that much of what was consuming me at the time was the question of my present working situation and an overall feeling of being out of control and locked in despair. A 4 hour a day position came with a lot of positives- being three blocks away from my work, a split shift which not only gave me the opportnity to be at home with the dogs during the day, but also to still retain a reasonable morning start time and a full evening during the weekdays. In some ways even the economic challenges had a slight upsight, showing that it was possible to survive on a fraction of my normal wage. And as the year went on in many respects I had adapted to the new pace of life and was making the most of things in regards to investing in one of my biggest projects: finally making some headway on a “writing my life story” project that felt stuck in the mud. But in the moment of penning last years Rosebud this economic position and pace of life had also opened up a spiral into a really bad head space.

Fast forward and I would find out last Spring that my present place of employment would be offering me a full time postion as Transportation Manager, which I have since accepted and which bumps me back up to full time work. And as mentioned, I likewise made some major headway in my project, having managed to at least push through a crude first draft, meaning I finally have something completed and which exists on page that I can start to work with and retool and reshape.

In other words, lots of positive changes that directly impact the buds above. My full time job still allows me to be home during the day for the dogs and to have my evenings. More so, this feels likely to be the last real job transition, save for some unforeseen issues, before I reach retirement age (yikes). On that same note, 2025 also saw us sitting down with the bank to refinance our mortgage at an amount that officially sees a mortgage free future quickly approaching. Which is to say, if I started the year with uncertainty I ended it with more stability than I’ve had in a while. And it should be said, I do genuinely love my job, which might be the most important factor.

My word for the year was reclaim, a word that was largely targetting my thorn, which related directly to reclaiming the many portions of my life from the anxieties that were holding it enslsaved. Some of these were forced and needed decisions, choices, actions that I knew I needed to navigate this past year which felt overly massive and overwhelming to me. While the job change and the ensuing change in pace did steal the early momentum I gained in reclaiming and keeping up this blogspace as a kind of ritual presence, cutting out most of the facebook groups that had been sucking me into that vortex of never ending argumentation that was largely enabling me to escape my anxieties helped to reformulate some of attention and energy into pushing through those needed decisions, choices and actions.

Looking Ahead: Rosebud 2026

Three Roses

1. Managed to leave and stay off of the facebook groups that had been eating up so much of my time and mental space.
2. Accepted and navigated a change in job
3. Faced some big fears and pressed back on some crippling anxiety

One Thorn:

1. The new pace of life has pushed me into a place where my brain has less time to get lost in those anxieties, but also less time for intentional management of my mental space. Figuring out how to stay aware of where I am at when my attention and world has become so narrowed is something I need to figure out.

Three Buds:

1. I  struggled big time with turning 40. Turning 50 in 2026 is bringing its own unique set of challenges mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I need to get ahead of that stuff and try and harness it in a direction that keeps me from spiralling. A big part of that feels like tapping into what motivates me on the broader level of meta narratives and beliefs, but also in the specifics of my participation in that story.
2. 50 feels ike the kind of moment to check something big off your list. If that’s the case, perhaps this is the year I finally do my trip to England, a bud that has shown up here year after year. Given that our current circumstance, having a pair of dogs that cannot go to the kennel and which require certain sacrifices that keep us bound to home I am not sure what that looks like or how that happens, but here’s to a potential bud
3. Shifting into more intentionality when it comes to my investments when it comes to my time and money and attention. I am thinking here mostly of this growing experience and feeling of turning 50 and being confronted with a world I no longer recognize or know. This year in particular has seen the most viceral and visible stripping away of one of my great loves- film. Something that has not just been a formative part of my life since I was a young kid, but which has been a massive part of my daily routine and conversations and relationships and passions. Thus this bud is about making space to grieve the many losses that the arrow of time represents and making and carving new space to preserve and recontextuaize why that stuff matters. This includes membership at my local arthouse, subscribing to services like Mubi instead of Netflix, donating and participating in the restoration of the local theater in Selkirk (my adopted second home town), shifting from Kindle to Kobo where my purchases can better support authors and books directly, continuing to support local bookstores, making direct connections with the people behind the art I value.

Word of the year: Motivation

“Christmas-day makes all the days of the year as sacred as itself.”

“He was one who believed with his whole soul in the things that make Christmas precious.”

• George MacDonald

There’s an anonymous quote from Nadiyka’ Gerbish’s book A Ukrainian Christmas, a book I finished this Christmas morning as I sit waiting for the family to get up (along with 8 cups of coffee, two more books, three christmas films and this blog post) that goes, “Light never fights darkness, but overcomes it with its very presence. Christmas does not fight hoplessness- it just comes, leaving no room for despair.” 

This is a sentiment made alive in Gerbish’s exploration of Ukranain Christmas Tradition, which is, from the authors own explanation, less a description of facts and more of a lens through which to see and make sense of the Ukrainian story and history. Through this lens it then becomes possible to see the shaping of world history from this perspective of this central space holding that social and geopolitical realities of both East and West in its same soil. 

One of the unique things about Ukraine is that it became this fusion of Traditions and beliefs and cultures born from (often competing) cultural realities rolling like a snowball from one side to another, picking up all of these bits and pieces as it goes. This is no more evident than it is in the Ukranian Tradition, with its customs becoming a window into understanding the rest of the world that surrounds it.

And yet its not just the preservation of its own Tradition that matters in this discussion, is the ways this window brings an understanding of that central tension that guides the whole of the human experience. A tension in which darkness is the norm and light is the exception. Where war is the norm and peace is the exception. We tend to miss this in the sheltered spaces of our western traditions where the tensions take on a different shape and concern within our ideological and largely privileged battles for cultural dominance, but we are nevertheless part of this same reality. In one of the book’s most fascinating chapters (Songs and Carols), one of the ways this becomes most aware is in recognizing the stories and contexts behind the songs that we sing, detached as we’ve become from that history. Looking at these songs from that vantage point can be a humbling thing, because it makes one aware of just how much of our Christmas celebrations struggle to articulate the same sense of necessary presence.

I’ve noticed a trend in many of the podcast episodes I have been listening to this season towards deconstructing many of misconceptions about the biblical narrative of Jesus’ birth as well, with a particular interest in dismantling our assumptions about there being “no room in the inn,” a word that isn’t in the text and wouldn’t make sense of the second temple context (Jesus was born in a family home in the great room). The same discussion can apply to the ways we recontextualize the birth narrative into our time and place as well. Here the book A Ukranian Christmas helps us see that in its historical narrative,

“Christmas is a time that reminds us that justice and love prevail, even when it seems that both are slowly dying. It ensures the indestructbility of hope in times of the greatest hopelessness. For as long as we celebrate Christmas, we can neither be defeated nor destroyed.”

As long as we celebrate Christmas. From this end critiquing our own space and own place and time need not be the discarding of our Traditions, but rather seeking to understand them. Yes, we can follow that history in a way that brings us through the soil of Ukraine, but we also are living and embodying our present moment. It is understanding both of these aspects as existing in relationship that can bring the appropriate tension to the surface. Light and dark, hope and despair, war and peace. As the author concludes,

“In times such as the people of Ukraine are living through today, the Christmas story has particular resonance. God sent a vulnerable chid to the world to bring peace, reminding us that genuine peace should also embody justice for the poor, the weary, and the oppressed…. there is hope for that in the mystery of Christmas”

As George MacDonald writes above, Christmas is the beginning of the story of hope, and thus is the lens through which we see all of history. It is the means by which every day becomes as sacred as this day of common and worldwide celebrations, in all of their cultural representations

In the most recent episode of the Give and Take podcast, titled The Gospels as History, with Edward J. Watts (#315), host Scott Jones talks with Watts about his “Gospel maximalist” approach to the story of Jesus, (a discussion he qualifies as a holiday themed episode)

Watts is coming at this as a historian who’s specific interest relates to the history of ancient Rome, especially where it concerns bridging the very different worlds of the first century and the later centuries. He’s also looking at it as one who stands, relatively speaking, outside of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, or at the very least without any clear allegiances outside of his specific historical concerns.

What I found really interesting about Watts’ perspective, especially as I get set to dive in to his massive The Romans: A 2000 Year History (which Jones interviewed him for on an earlier episode), is the way he cuts through some of the noise that extant disciplines can sometimes create. Certainly one area this applies to is in his argument for an earlier dating of Marks Gospels (which of course brings the whole in tow) than certain popular disciplines would allow. His foundation for this argument, placing Mark in the 60’s prior to the destruction of the temple, is his analysis of the ancient world itself. As he notes, there is nothing strange at all regarding the way the Gospel compositions emerge in its world and as part of its complex environment, which would be perfectly in line with other figures in first century Rome.

One of the central facetes of his argument stems from the infamous theoretical Q source. While there has been a larger movement away from that theory (a path I think I would follow at the moment), one of the things he helps to unpack is how these accounts of figures emerge. If, as is largely accepted, Paul’s writings are the earliest window we have into this emerging Tradition(s) surrounding Jesus, what we have then is a figure (Pau) writing at a time of transition. Paul was writing at a time when those who walked and talked with Jesus were still alive and where these voices were accessible. Paul is also writing to communities whom have clearly been established around an already prominant credal presence, and within his specific Greco-Roman concern is clearly writing to communities where Jesus’ life and teachings were assumed to be known. Thus, as the Gospels emerge out of this soil they would have emerged as part of that natural concern for the preservation of this figure, in light of these eye witnesses dying out, whom they see as having utmost importance to their lives. Which is precisely how any such figure gets preserved at this point in history.

And in purely historical terms, this practice and effort would not have been taken lightly. Hence why Watts argues that a Q source makes perfect sense. This is how this act of preservation worked in the ancient world, and it actually gives us a window into how the Gospels all fit together as a larger conversation.

What’s interesting about this is contrasting this with Mark Goodacre’s new book, The Fourth Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which actually fits within a similar argument as Watts with the exception of applying a later dating. Its worth mentioning that in the larger discussions within biblical scholarship right now John has found itself once again at the forefront, with much reconsideration for how common misunderstandings of its detachment from the world of the synoptics is being addressed. Goodacre I think is one voice making a compelling argument for this material swimming in the same waters as the whole.

If Watts is accurate, what we have is an active effort by disconnected communities to preserve the words of Jesus (hence the Q source). Why the words? Watts helpfully explains how when it came to figures of philosophical and theological concern, it was always the words that mattered over the story. The stories themselves were free to ebb and flow within these distanced contexts, told as they are within literary conventions and concerns and compositions, but the words were seen to be the thing that had to be preserved in the way they were spoken. Watts argues that this is exactly what we find in all four Gospels. Juxtapose this with histories of a people or an empire or a nation, and what you get is a story first mentality with the words themselves being the thing that was free to fluctuate.

Lots to think about. One of the things this evokes for me is simply a needed corrected in certain assumptions regarding the relationship between compositions and the sourcing. Any composition is a window into a pre-existing  credal presence. Even in the case of Paul, an argument can be made that his earliest writings place us within 3 years of Jesus’ death, thus presupposing an already existing creed that arguably places us within a year of Jesus’ death. Of course of concern for academics is trying to trace this composition history, and the question for debate is whether or not these creative compositions are actively inventing new ideas, particularly around the person and identity of Jesus. I think writings like Watts and Goodacres, and I would throw in Brant Pitre’s new book Jesus and Divine Christology, which I think is the most definitive defeater of the idea that Jesus did not calim to be that which we find in all four Gospels (the incarnate Christ), actively give us very good reason to trust that these sources are actively preserving the words of Jesus. And not simply the words but a unified conversation between these distanced communities. To engage with the storytelling of the Gospel narratives, something which we expressly do in this season of Advent and Christmas, is to be entering into a conversation about those words within their specific second temple Judean framework. That I think makes it all the more powerful.

I don’t know what happened on the mountain but something deep has changed. Cause who I was is not who I’m becoming, I’m not the man who came.

I found love like I never thought I would. I found love like I never thought I could.

But it didn’t happen the way I was always taught. Like my religion ran away with every other thought. Cause how on earth could you resist Him or struggle to believe when you have met with Heaven’s maker and you’ve seen what I have seen.

Who am I that you would so abandon the pleasure of your throne. Cause if its just the doors I keep I wanna be your hands and feet, I want to say I’m hopelessly in love.

Cause I found love like I never thought I would. I found love like I never thought I could.

I have a hunger I’ve never had before. Like every moment I’m only wanting more. There’s no remedy to set it all at ease when you have met the one who moved you to your knees.

• Seen What I Have Seen, Seth Carpenter

I had been ruminating on a line from one of George MacDonald’s Christmas stories.

“A man may have light in the brain and darkness in the heart.”

In an unexpected turn, while I started the year in the water, exploring the theme of rivers and oceans and lakes, I found the later part of my year in 2025 turning towards the subject of the brain. I’m honestly not sure how I got there, but I ended up working through the likes of Iain McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Ervin Laszio’s ‘The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciosness Beyond the Brain, Andrew Newberg’s How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings From a Leading Neuroscientist, Hawkin’s A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. All of these building off of Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith. Or perhaps on a larger level one of the more defining books I read this year, David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of God’s: The Mysteries of Mind and Life

At the heart of all these discussions is the same essential question: what is the mind and what is the spirit. Can we even distinguish between such things? Can we locate something beyond the materialism that holds so much of our explanations in a coherent and logical box which we can then control? And if not, what is this thing precisely that appears to transcend the material brain? Are we merely moving into the realm of physics as another expression of the same fundamental appeal to materialism? Are we making leaps in our reason to justify our values and our appeals to meaning by appealing to this commonly called complexity? As though moving in the other direction away from the reductionism that grounds our assumptions can somehow hand us something other? Do we appeal to the common scientific premise of “energy” to try and deny our fundmental appeal to materialism? Ways of partioning out mind and matter using the same terms.

To borrow from author/philsopher Paul Kingsnorth, I know what it is to feel like a right brained person stuck in a left brained world, something he evokes to describe the experience of living in the West and its scientific worldview. And to be clear, while the scientific concern has long critiqued this reductionist approach to the brain, recent work in the field (See Mcgilchrist) has been recovering a revitalized and reconstituted version of this same observation. Not in the sense that we reduce the conversation to two competing sides of a brain, but in the sense that we, as humans, are responding to something that is also intuitively aware in our biology, relating specifically to how it is we percieve the world. We live and breathe this tension because we live and breathe this apparent cognitiive disonnance- this world is matter, and yet it matters because it is also more.

When I came across that quote from MacDonald it sparked something in me that started to bring some of these observations and wrestlings together with a percieved clarity. If this notion of the heart as an allegory for the human experience has morphed and changed over time and with different cultures, the ancient conception of the heart as the seat of the spirit has nevertheless persisted within the tendencies of the modern west to take this cognitive disonnnace and cloak it with our own conceptions of meaning. One of the problems with applying this in the modern world however is that while the metaphor makes sense of the way the world actually works in terms of our experience of it (or in terms of all things existing in relationship), it struggles to reconcile this with the truth of its foundation. To borrow from Hart, it’s not rational to say all things are full of gods if what we are describing is a world measured in terms of the material, be it through mechanics of physics. Metaphors only hold power in so far as they are rooted in something true, and thus it is the truth behind the metaphor, the thing to which it is pointing, that reveals its strength or its efficacy.

Thus we are brought back to that essential tension. What do our metaphors point to? In MacDonald’s quote, and indeed in each of the book’s that I cited above, one could argue that the metaphors are the very thing that bring us back to that necessary tension. This becomes the grounds for our necessary embrace of what we might call the mystery. But here’s the thing. An appeal to mystery doesn’t mean an appeal to something we don’t yet know. Mystery requires an active trust that this Truth we are seeking after exists. Mystery is not reduced to information, to the science that is yet to be discovered. Science itself requires msytery in order to justify its practice. It is not filling in the gaps between the information we know and that which we don’t yet know. Rather, it is, as all things are, the embodied practice of participating in a world we hold to be true. That simple question is- what is that world. Or what is the qualitative nature of that world.

A world measured by its complexity is a world we experience based on our prior convictions of what this world is. It is that foundation that frees us to participate in it. To contextualize it. To justify it according to the way we actually live in it as embodied creatures.

And here is where I think things come back to the essential revelation of that tension. I think we all intuitively understand this wrestling between mind and heart to be true. For me I find this to be most aware in my need to ask the why questions. I live in a world that is constantly telling me that it is about the what questions. This is the necessary foundation of modernism. The why then occupies a seperate metaphysical concern in this view. And yet this same modern conception reveals the simple truth that we can never make sense of the what (utility and function) apart from the why. Or more to the point, we don’t. This might get buried, it might be disguised, it might be represented by a willful ignorance or honest neglect or forgottenness. And yet it would be near impossibly to make the logical statement that it is not in fact true to how humans work. To how knowledge works.

It is the why that fuels the what.

Or perhaps more relevant would be statement that modernism has hollowed out the what by diluting and neutering our access and awareness of the why.

We cannot approach any honest discussion about this world without these coexisting and interdependent facets. The why is informed by that fundamnetal and underlying belief that we trust enough to allow us to move out into the world as participants. The what is a part of the embodied space we occupy as a result. As these two things function together they bring us towards proper knowledge, something that can equally be said to be always incomplete but similtaneously coherent, precisely because it is rooted in the place we begin from: the beating heart of it all.

And here’s someting I’ve been thinking a lot about over the course of this year. If materialism, however complex it inherently is as an experession of reality’s constanty emergent properties, informs our foundation, if this is the location of our inherent trust, the heart of it all, we are left with this truth that for all of the ways we participate in this world according to that complexity the mystery remains bound to and is contained by that which clarifies it. Thus the tension that is revealed by of our participation in this world cannot tell us otherwise- this is the true shape of the world. Apart from this our observations can only hand us something we can control in technological terms. Hence why what we end up with in this point of perspective is the western myth of progress. Hence also why I think Hawkin’s is right in suggesting that such a worldview essentially commits us to an old brain/new brain view, where the new brain wrapping around the old becomes our primary metaphor for this modern myth. It represents a truer form of knowledge, that which enables us to control technological progress. It supersedes the old emotions, that which was once needed for our survial but now impedes us.

But of course, to borrow the sentiment from Midgley in “The Myths We Live By,” this understanding has an awfully hard time making sense of the rest of life. Meaning, if Hawkin’s theory is true what we are handed is a human experience we cannot reconcile, given that it actively fights against it, whether we are aware of this or not.

Which brings me to the lyrics of the song I started this post with, a song I happened across in the still darkness of this mornings awaiting dawn. The line that rang out for me and that captured my attention was “it didn’t happen the way I as always taught.” This not only brought me to consider the the unexpectedness of the Christmas story, but the shape of my own lifes story. What my mind seeks is humbled by the beating heart of it all precisely because of the ways my assumed foundation keeps breaking in and justifying itself. This, I find, is how any given foundation gains its explanatory power. And part of this journey for me is constantly asking myself the question, how does my foundation accord with the world I observe and experience. Or from the other vantage point, how does the world I observe and experience reveal the truth of my foundation (and in what ways).

I think back to my once storied journey out of Christianity. I think as well of my journey out of atheism and towards an exploration of compartiive religions. I think about my journey back into a reimagined Christianity. In some respect all three of these points in my story were attempting to engage the same thing- the existing tension of mind and matter, spirit and brain.

If I was to point to why I find myself situated where I am in the present, the rest of the echos in Carpenters song also ring true for me.

I don’t know what happened, but something changed.

It invaded my certainty.

Invaded my assumptions.

Caught me off guard.

I would not stop at my own story however. One of the most compelling things to me about the world I observe and experience is that this same quality marks the stories of the vast majority of people that I encounter from around the world within different tradtions and different experiences. This is, to put it in simple terms, the quality of such foundations that hold the transcendent to be reflective of a union of body and spirit rather than something that emerges from this material reality. As the lyrics of the song suggest, this is the shared and coexisting idea that we don’t know and yet we know. Such foundations are never certain, and yet they are rooted in that which we observe and experience, in that which is tangible and demonstrable.

The simple fact of this world is that it seems to have these qualities. So much so that it transforms its inhabitants by way of this inherent trust or faith that allows us to participate as though it is true. Like the atheist who says “I can’t force myself to know what I know,” so goes the sentiment of the one who holds to this transcendent nature as being qualitatively true. As the song goes, I can’t force myself to resist when I have met it. This is something I feel, something that resonates. Something that explains the world I experience and observe.

“Mirren was a lifelong book obsessive, who never felt she had quite enough books, who could really only feel secure with half a dozen unread paperbacks propped up by her bedside table, three libary cards, two Kindles, and an emergency set of Douglas Adams in the bathroom, in the case the lock broke.” (The Secret Christmas Library, Jenny Colgan)”

“But his power of reading began to diminish. He became restless and irritable. Something kept gnawing at his heart. There was a sore spot in it. The spot grew larger and larger, and by degrees the centre of his consciousness came to a soreness;” (The Gifts of the Child Christ, George MacDonald)

The above confession made by Colgan’s main character (Mirren) comes in the first pages of chapter 1 of her book The Secret Christmas Library, and my immediate reaction was that I felt seen. This describes the way I live my life (and the reality of how books occupy ever space of my home, my car, my work, my jacket pockets). This fear that at any point in any place I might find myself caught in a moment without a book is real.

Those who don’t get it will roll their eyes. Those who do know the battle is real. To be lost in this world without a story is to be stranded without a means of making sense of things. This is bigger than the pages of a book, and indeed the unfolding journey of Mirren in Colgan’s Christmas mystery witnesses to this truth.

The calendar year is quickly coming to a close, and I’ve been turning my attention to both reflection and anticipation. Looking back at my reading year it struck me how immersed I’ve been in these waning months in both that question of why story matters, certainly fueled by the sobering realities facing our cinematic landscape with the recent news of mergers, and in reading stories about why it matters. It is the sacred call of Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By, the science behind Storr’s The Science of Storytelling, the interest of Jason Baxter in his exploration of the Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, shaped as it is by the books that he was abosrbed in. It’s even embedded in the why of Tolkien and Lewis’ own embrace of mythmaking (Loconte’s The War for Middle Earth, Hendrix’s The Mythmakers). It’s been found to the central lens through which we understand the different parts of scripture (Numbers: A Commentary, Johnson’s Understanding Biblical Law).

As 2025 comes to a close this essential truth seems to be prevalant: story matters.

I found the early months of 2025 sweeping me towards the subject of rivers and oceans. Heading into 2026 it feels like I’m now tumbling head first into that which water awkaens in me: the myths the waters hold and preserve. Thus I’ve been building this into my 2026 plans as  my starting point, shaped as it is by a couple interweaving componants:

1. Books about story
2. Books about scripture as story
3. Books about the art of letter writing

On the first front I’ve got a collection of related books with a shared emphasis on why reading matters. As the above quote from George MacDonald evokes, there is a restlessness not simply to finding ourselves lost without a story, but to understanding why story matters. Here I’ve lined up Shannon Reed’s Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out, which is described as a book exploring the simply joy of storytelling.

Along with that I’ve got Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which looks at Mangan’s own childhood draw to stories and the page. Broadening out beyond memoir, she also wrote Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives which gives this examination of her childhood a broader application. The Keeper of Stories. To round that out is also Mac Barnett’s Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children.

What is perhaps the driving force of this collection, Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books, and Kaitlin Curtice’s Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives (which felt like a good pairing with Frederic Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life)

On the second front, I am diving into the Gospel according to Mark in 2026, along with continuing on with my foray into the Old Testament narratives. Here David Rhoads Mark As Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel is helping to shape that connection, along with Jeannine K. Brown’s The Gospels as Stories: A Narrative Approach to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and on the OT front, David L Petersons Genesis: A Commentary

The third componant (letter writing) might feel like an odd addition to this whole endeavor, but I’ll see if I can explain. As mentioned, a big part of what has shaped the waning months of this year has been the news of the merger with Netflix and Warner Brothers. Without getting lost in the weeds of why that matters to an entire Tradition of storytelling, one that is been a vital part of my own life ever since my first time gracing the screen as a young kid, suffice to say it has sparked discussion of things that I can preserve or, in to use what has been my word of the year, reclaim. In a world and in an age, looking ahead to my 50th year, where life seems more and more to be shaped by loss, are there things I can do to recenter myself on why such things mattered in the first place.

It was a recommendation to pair Virginia Evans The Correspondent, a novel that celebrates letter writing, with Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life that got me thinking. Described as reclaiming the lost art of letter writing by way of a cultural history, it brings to light one simple example of putting pen to paper and resurrecting a long lost tradition, a practice that can translate to any area of life. If the world I find at 50 is seeming less and less familiar, perhaps there is a way to live adjecent to the way of the world around me.

In thinking about bringing these books into the fold as an interconnecting piece of that larger discussion regarding lives as story, I also came across a book by Elana Zaiman called The Forever Letter: Writing What We Believe For Those We Love. A book inspired by the Jewish Tradition of the ethical will. Given that much of 2025 was given to trying to “tell my story” in the form of a long standing project to put my story to page, a self reflective process that has found a good deal of progress since January. It felt like this could be a good thing to pair with that exercise.

As it is every year, this is a starting point. Soon I’ll be turning my attention to my annual new years resolution practice called Rosebud, and part of that exercise is building on the year that preceded it, noting the strengths and weaknesses and forming that into a sense of needed attention or focus. The most exciting part of that exercise is that it is simply a place to begin. Where things go from there remain a mystery, but as a number of authors and voices have reminded me in 2025, mystery is the necessary means to reminding ourselves that Truth exists and Truth can be known, a simple statement of faith that frees us to emody the present.

The first movie I ever saw on the big screen was Lady and the Tramp. What added to the allure of this family affair, which reflected a spontaneous outing with my parents, my brother, my aunt, uncle and cousins to a since closed downtown Winnipeg movie theater, is the fact that we were expressly told that we wer not to tell my grandparents about our afternoon out on the town. This was to be our secret.

You see, at the time my grandparents looked at the theater as being “of the devil.” That place where all manners of temptations coexisted and cohabitated, threatening to lure us away from God.

Funny how it ultimatley became a place where I have rediscovered and met God  over my life time.

From that very first experience with the lights and the sounds and the people and the magic, all packed away in the safety of my childhood memories, my imagination was captured. Here was moving picture telling a story using an artform wholly unfamiliar to me in the moment, beckoning me into the mystery. Giving me a way to make sense of the world I was existing within.

It sounds cliche. It sounds hyperbolic and melodramatic. And maybe its all those things. But it’s also true.

While books remain my first love, this was something categorically different. Rather than sending me inside my own head this brought me out of it. Yes, even as a young child encountering this classic animated tale I was enchanted. Some might say this was still in the glory days of Disney storytelling.

What I have found myself thinking about over the last number of days is why that is. What is it about this moment that reshaped how I conceptualized the power of story? What is it about the express power of film to evoke this in me the way that it did.

I’ve been thinking about this while sitting in the aftershocks of the recent headlines regarding Netflix’s aquistion of Warner Brothers. If you aren’t familiar, or just want a good conversation and anaylsis of the situaiton and the broader issues at hand, I highly recommend listening to the latest episode of Next Best Picture (Episode 469). It’s marked, so you don’t need to listen to all three hours, you can fast forward to near the end. Suffice to say however that this has felt like a singular moment which has robbed me of nearly 50 years of this love of the movies. Conjuring up memories of visiting WB sturdios in the late 90’s when it was still a part of that vibrant era.

To be sure, this is just a feeling. Although what is reason but feelings being expressed. But it is this awarness of how quickly the world we know can be pulled out from under us at the blink of an eye. Where the innocence of wonder and hope and faith and trust starts to give away. Of how the world I’ve occupied and been formed by and that handed me my sense of place and identity starts to feel strange and foreign and false, something seemingly not my own.

And how all of that translates as loss.

This isn’t a singular moment either. I’ve been feeling this in many aspects of my life as of late. Loss that evokes grief in a social media landscape that not only fails to recognize it as grief but leaves no space for it. Ridicules it. Calls it irrational.

I know for me, and for many of the stories I’m seeing that bea similar feelings and sentiments, this particular moment is bigger than just a transaction. It’s more than the popular and abused rhetoric such as “things change” and “adapt or die” would imply, phrases that fail to recognize the simple truth that change is never benign. It matters because so much of me is bound up in this stuff. Thus why something that can seem and feel insignficant on the surface can awaken these feelings of being left lost and alone in this increasinbly foreign world. A cast off of this cruel thing we call life. A forgotten relic of an age that pretended life was significant and yet revealed itself to have always been about adaptation. Making our lives just a necessary step towards this thing that gets romanticized as illusions of progress.

Strong feelings to pull from this, I know. But as I often say, every conversation matters because life matters, and this is all the stuff of life. When you have spent so much of your life carving out space for this thing called cinema and everything that surrounds it, when this as been such a massive part of your daily routines and community dialogue and anticipation. This becomes a very real part of who a person is.

It’s interesting that this moment, this first encounter with the sights and sounds of the moving picture, was birthed from a small act of rebellion. And not even one of my own. An act of rebellion by my parents as they were navigating the very real changes of their own time. They were the ones saying, once upon a time, maybe the ways in which we experience this world should look a little different than yours. All while quietly navigating the carefully crafted parameters of their decision to bring their imagined world into existence through us, their children.

I wonder if this is what all acts of rebellion utlimately look like. In some ways the world we inherit as kids is the world our parents reimagined for us. Until of course we reach the point of our own rebellion, as all grown up children inevitably do. And then we start that cycle all over again from our own vantage point.

That’s one side of the equation. But what about the other? What about the world of my grandparents? What about the world they were losing? It’s funny how that’s the world that I found myself most compelled to uncover and understand as I got older. And the older I get the closer I seem to come to feeling a kind of affinity with the other side of the equation. And yet they aren’t here for me to share that space with. Which perhaps is what can make this process feel so alone.

There is something that seemed to strike me in fleshing that out though. That’s the simple notion that what seems to get deconstructed in this process is any notion that this cycle is about heading somewhere particular or better. At least in terms of the world we are building. This might be what drives us in our acts of rebellion, this innate belief in the illusion of this promise of progress, but what its actually about is our ability to make sense of the spaces we occupy in the here and now, in the present, in light of our past. Our here and now will always be met with an act of rebellion, but that rebellion isn’t working to disqualify it in terms of bringing about a superior future. Rather, this brings us to a greater awareness of that thing that draws all of history foward at the same stim- Truth. The things we build in this world will always change, Truth does not. And if this affords me any comfort, any sense of coherency, it is that the potential (and in truth, its been happening now for a while already) dismantling of the space that I held to be sacred is not synonymous with the Truth these spaces allowed me to seek.

If this love of cinema was shaped first by an act of rebellion, the other facet that lingers in these recent ruminations for me is its connection to that space that ultimately became sacred- the theater. There can be many spaces one holds to be sacred, but one of the most beautiful things for me about my relationship to the movies was that it was caught up in this movement. This intentional act of of displaceing myself, of going from one space to another in an expectation of encountering the transcendent. This was the investment.

All this said, there are still moments to be found. There are still filmmakers making art. There are still experiences there to cherish. For me Chloe Zhao is one of those filmmakers with the rare ability to remind me of why I love cinema, a truism that held fast in my recent viewing of Hamnet.

I experience that love all the time, but to be reminded that it’s there is what makes her work transcendent 

I fell in love with the novel. In the early going I confess I was wrestling with how the internal dialogue that shapes those early sections was translating to a quick moving plot on screen. Not necessarily in a bad way, simply in a way that left me trying to unpack the nature of this adaptation. It’s when we come to the initial big moments though that the subtle threads she was weaving start to come together, and the final 45 minutes truly soar to some exceptional heights, not least of which comes on the shoulders of Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal and its captivating score.

This is a story about the ways art can make sense of life’s tragedies. Similarly, it is about how such experiences give life to our art. This is a deeply hopeful film about faith conquering doubt and life conquering death, but it’s also a film about the things that bind us. The things that enslave us.

Perhaps it’s this present moment and it’s especially charged emotions, but there was a moment in which I found myself in tears, and suddenly it hit me that I was sitting in a company of tears, all of us impacted by this story at the same time from the vantage point of our own stories. And I realized that in this moment that this was a metaphor for all the ways I was grieving this latest news about Netflix and WB, and that feeling of having 50 years of this love for the form stolen right out from under me. To begin to see the years ahead inevitably shaped by this sense of loss was met with a reminder that this moment matters.

And so I cried some more, remembering why I cherish this space and this experience. Being once again made aware of the Truth this space is unveiling in my need to learn how to see the unchanging nature of God more clearly.

I have found myself coming back to this book many times over the years, but always by way of portions or summaries or external dialgoues about her ideas and her thesis. That it felt due time to finally sit down and read it front to back was an afterthought to the stars finally aligning. This wasn’t on my radar to read this month (December, 2025), but it nevertheless found its way into the line up.

Here Midgley has an aim or a target. We might call it science, but its more so a particular formulation of science into a worldview. But I think her target reaches even further, bringing in the whole enlightenment enterprise as part of a necessary critique. She even gives it an embodied form- the new atheists. Whom she cites repeatedly within the context of the larger problem. Of course its always dangerous to reduce any work to a singular idea or concept, but given her interests I do think its fair. These thinkers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) all have their own voices but are birthed in the same soil and breathe the same air. If someone percieves there to be a problem (an observation I am in agreement with), it is those core Enlightenment ideals that provides the way into naming it. That these particular examples of “representative voices” are evoked is simply because, as she intuits, we are still living in their shadows. I don’t think its unfair to call out their well established presuppositions as having certain implications when it comes to our understanding of knowledge and science and truth and myth, and in her most upfront and biting critique, the phrase that still stands out for me is that if what they presuppose is true, “it would not (be) a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life.” This feels apt I think to where many of us find ourselves on what is arguably the other side of our needed efforts to deconstruct the world the new atheists handed us.  

As Midgley points out, such a view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works as an experiential act. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us, roots knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.

We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is in fact a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy. And for good reason. And part of what Midgley is arguing is that even someone like Dawkin’s knows this to be true. It’s why his efforts to root knowledge in science inevitably keep being betrayed by the invading force of his value systems. And yet his, and much of the reasoning tthat we find birthed from this same soil and breathing this same air, is built on a foundaiton that has certain implications that must hold it to account if it indeed wants to be rational.

The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as, in Midgley’s own summarization, “a storage cupboard” of objective facts, is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control is found when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.

More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. This betrays the motivations of this enlightenment foundation. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it can then wieve a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). And therefore better and more necessary.

Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence). And yet, treating science as a worldview would lead us exactly to where someone like Hawkin’s is going with the data.

Midgley pushes further to speak of enlightenment morality as a social contract that upholds the rights of the individual in ways that demand us versus them pardigms. This of course exposes the foundation of a scientific worldview that needs this notion of primitive to enlightened to uphold our notions of progress. This has only become muddled in light of globalism, something that has thrown our conceptions of responsiblity to one another into chaos. When values and ideals are held captive to the notion of social constructs, how can it be possible to say that oppression is inherently bad in all places and all ways in all of life. And yet the enlightenment ideal of the unity of all defined as the liberty of the individual must say this, even as the natural world that we occupy pushes back. That this is a tension that always by its nature exists within a culture not between different cultures is one of Midgley’s more astute points.

On eft neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the simple observation that reasoning is powered by feeling and all feeling is rooted in reason, and yet we occupy space in a culture that elevates thought, or a kind of thought that has to do with data and information, as the primary source of objective truth. Which of course sidelines and deligitimizes the role of subjective truth. As though data is what frees us and all else must bend to it in order to be true and rational. Thus the contractual language is the scientific language and the unity language is the language of feeling (hence: irrational), and yet the enlightenment uses the latter to justify the former.

If Midgely sees a way out of this it is through understanding how so much of this traverses the dominant scientific language of our time. Where atomism dominated so did certain conceptions of a mechanical world full of meat machines. Where physics as replaced it comes opportunities to reimagine the world using a different metaphor. And in some ways to reenchant it by reaching back into one of its most formative tools- myth. Here we move from reductionism to complexity, or a sort of science that is not demanding a unified theory of everything but rather recognizes that different ways of knowing are all participating in the same conversation, which is what is knowledge (or true knowledge) and how is it that we know anything at all. Here science is but one part of a larger conversation, and even within science are the different sciences that inform the discipline within its different areas of concern. She uses the illustration later in the book of a map, which I think is helpful. We can have 20 different maps all speaking of the same observed and experienced reality or world, but all categorically different perspectives. This is how knowledge works.

Most imporantly, it is on this front that we find the freedom to locate knowledge outside of oursevles. That we are free to see values as occupying its own space, even as part of the same conversation. In fact, as Midgley points out, it is only within the different disciplines that value can be truly established. Humanism, for example, or the natural sciences, are the only places where values can be imposed on its subject from the outside. Which becomes an interesting discussion where myth is involved. Because such an acknolwedgment must at once recognize that it is the human subject affording this value, and yet it is also being pulled from the outside. Such is the nature of the discipline. Here Midgely points out that it is simply not the case, as the enlightenment has been want to believe, that we can move from a world of belief in God to a world in which the God is made human. Here science masquerades as ideology and value systems. Not just an age where we use science, but an age where we are guided by science. Since all human socities have engaged in science, it is the “guided” part that distinguishes the modern age. It wants to root all of the things science can’t be or do in science, while similtaneously defining science as the essential “human” accomlishment that raises us to the role God once occupied. It is “we” who have made the world better because of science. And it is the we that must be better than “them” in the myth of progress

This is my own aside, but it is interesting that the Christian story does in fact speak of a historical moment in which God is made human. The key difference is that this movement comes from the outside. It roots all value making in the notion that where all things exist in relationship, all relationship is rooted in Truth. It is that Truth that has the authority to afford the subject of this natural world value. As her final chapters unpack and point out, all else leaves us captive to the wildness of nature, forever attempting to reconcile evil as good and good as evil within the contexts and paramters of our social concern. Such becomes the illusive ebb and flow of our moral constructs, leaving us enslaved to irrational justifications of the natural world.

And really, this is the central problem. As Midgley points out, the scientific worldview represents knowledge as “building” information rather than as interaction with the world. It takes out that relationship componant which allows complexity to have a kind of agency in the conversation, and instead reduces the world to that which we can control. Hence why such a worldview is really about the progress of technology. Because in the end this is what intelligence becomes when we bind ourselves to such a myth (properly defined, not as a story that isn’t true, but as a story that brings to light the truths we are being shaped by). One such facinating insight the book provides is this concept of science looking both ways. If we can see science as the central human function that informs our relating to the world, captured as it is through all the varied disciplines it embodies, this allows us to look both ways, towards nature and towards God. Here Midgley is using God more as a metaphor, but I think she also gets at why “religion” is one of those necessary disciplines. It is as much a part of the world as anything else. Where we root that becomes a further discussion, but what’s important to note is that in both directions we are looking away from outselves and towards the whole. Defining one depends on our ability to define both. Even more so, how we define one dictates how we define the other. Which is why the stories, the myths, we tell are the ones we live by, precisely because they reflect what we really understand to be true about this world, this reality.

1 The beginning of the good news (Gospel) of Jesus Christ. (Mark 1:1)

The beginning.

The beginning of what?

The beginning of the Gospel, or the good news.

So what is the good news.

The good news isn’t simply something Jesus says, it is something Jesus does. Something Jesus accomplishes. It is the good news of Jesus.

Its worth posing the question: does this notion of the word beginning apply in light of the accomplishment, or does Mark describing the beginning of the story leading up to the accomplishment.

This may sound like a strange question and strange distinction to evoke. And yet, I would suggest that possible strangeness I think comes from a failure think about what precisely it is that Jesus accomplishes.

What precisley is the good news.

As my pastor suggested, Mark is notoriously light on details here and heavy on the narrative flow and design. Unlike the other Gospel writers he jumps in mid-stream. Is it possible though that beginning doesn’t relate to the beginning of Jesus’ story, at least not exclusively, but to the beginning of the new creation Jesus brings about.

Which would mean that this is both a proclomation to Mark’s original hearers that this new creation reality has not only arrived in Jesus, and also an invitation to live in to that reality. Just as Mark quotes a passage from Isaiah (40 in efforts to locate Jesus within the story of Israel, those words of Jesus to prepare the way for the Day of the Lord, an expectation and anticipation that would have brought with it an imagination regarding the renewal of all things, so are we invited in to this practice of expectation and anticipation. Something the Baptizer describes as practice of repentance.

We do so however in the reality of a single resurrection that arrives in the middle of history, effectively bringing this long expected and anticipated reality into view. This is then the beginning that Mark is proclaiming. God has begun the great act of making all things new. The kingdom of God has arrived. Beckoning us to to contemplate what precisely how that good news manifests in our own context. How it gives us an answer to the darkness we still occupy and the light that seeks to invade it.

As Brian Zahnd puts it in his Advent devotional, The Anticipated Christ, discussing Isaiah 35:1-10.

“Someday it will be said, “Here is your God” and on that day all that is wrong will be set right. But for now all we can do is wait.”

But, as Zahnd notes, as we wait we discern what God is doing. And that begins with God entering into history definitvely in Christ. In this sense “God is alwaays about to act and God is always acting.” Both things that are said in light of Isaiah’s stark and overriding proclomation “Behold, I am about to do a new thing.” (Isaiah 43) That new thing being making a way in the wilderness.

This is the beginning.

The beginning of the good news (Gospel) of Jesus Christ.

God in Jesus has made a way in the wilderness. Has carved a river in the desert. This is where the great expected and anticiapted Day of the Lord both arrives and begins. And lest we forget, there is no ending to Mark… we are all still occupying this space in the beginning of this story. We wait in Advent for Jesus. But we particpate in a world in which Jesus has made that way clear and true.

I have three books that I am using to shape my journey through Advent this season

The Grand Miracle: Daily Reflections For the Season of Advent (a collection of writings from different authors interacting with the likes of George Macdonald, Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, Davidman)

The anticipated Christ: A Journey Through Advent and Christmas (Brian Zahnd)

Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (Sarah Arthur)

Along with this I have our Advent services, which, as it does every year, starts a journey through one of the Gospels which will carry on through to the Easter season. This year we are working through the Gospel according to Mark.

Reflecting on the first day of Advent, the morning began with a piece from Diana Pavlac Glyer in The Grand Miracle reflecting on a quote from C.S. Lewis,

We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. (C.S. Lewis, Chiefly on Prayer)

Glyer reflects on making space in the Christmas season to be interrupted by the divine. To allow that presence to catch us off guard and to find us as we are, not in our carefully curated practices and celebrations but in our honest representations. She wonders about what this advent season requires of us, ruminating on the simple idea of simply being present. Present enough for God to break in, an act that can then inform our response- to move from being present to presenting ourselves to this God as we are.

As my pastor called us to do this morning, this fits with this notion of waiting for or anticipating this breaking in. In a broader sense we await Jesus’ return, the day in which all is made new. For this time, we find ourselves in the darkness of this inbetween space awaiting those foretastes of the world to come. Those moments when the light illuminates the darkness and reminds us of what it is we hope for.

One of the great practices we as Christians can engage as we wait is the continued prayer, come Lord Jesus, come. As our pastor noted however, to stop and reflect on what this prayer actually conjures up in us is to find ourselves face to face with all of the tensions and struggles and  confusion and questions and uncertainties and doubts that come with it. What does it mean to prayer for Jesus to come? And how does this prayer unsettle our grip on the world that is? The lives we’ve built. The dreams we’ve made. The experiences we cherish. The things we value. How does this longing for the world to come fit into this picture?

That’s a tough thing to confront. And yet its precisely the “as we are” picture Glyer is getting at. For Jesus to come is for God to break in. It’s one thing to present some decorated version of ourselves that entertains the feel good notions of the seasons festivities. It’s quite another thing for that to catch us off guard. When it finds us clinging to those things we don’t want God to disrupt.

And yet, such an encouter has the power to open our eyes to a much greater reality. As Zahnd puts it in his devotional, this (the Christmas story)  is “not really an encyclopedia of God-facts or a journal of divine jurisprudence, it is primarily the epic story of God’s ultimate triumph over evil.” Zhand points out that this story is not concerned with handing us some fleshed out account of the origin of evil, rather it is giving us a way into the central point of the story- evil has arrived and must be contended with. In fact, the judgment made in the beginning of the story is the same judgment that we find in the world to come- a judgment on evil. Not as moral action, but as an enslaving force that has invaded this world. It is the serpent that is cursed, which subsequently leads to a cursed land (creation). A land that cries out amdist the human story as the blood spilt on the ground illuminates the crisis.

But there is hope. Hope in the form of a seed. One day, the seed of the woman will bring about the crushing of the serpents head. This, the story says, will bring about the hoped for reality, the thing we are waiting and longing for- new creation.

A liberated creation.

As Sarah Arthur guides readers through in Light Upon Light, the words of a poem by Aurelius Prudentius ring out into this waiting space,

Of the father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be. He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see, evermore and evermore.

Or to echo the accompanying Psalm- The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. (Psalm 24)

And the refrain taken from Christina Rossetti (Later Life)

Remain; these days are short, but now the nights, intense and long, hang out their utmost lights; Such starry nights are long, yet not too long; Frost nips the weak, while strengthening still the strong, against that day when Spring sets all to rights

In his book A Philosophy of Belonging, scholar James Greenaway explores the idea of home.

He notes two ways of looking at the idea of home:

1. Home as an enclosure against the world, or an enclosure in which we retreat from the world

2. Home as a threshhold into the world, or a place in which we are able to step out into the world.

It could very well be that home requires holding both of these ideas together, and even in tension. In this sense he borrows language from his homeland (Ireland) in speaking of home in terms of the concept of “metaxu,” or an inbetween/liminal space in which these two truths are able to be accessed. For Greenaway, home is essential to this core human need to belong. This is what these two ideas of home give birth to when seen in relationship to our participation in this space.

He describes belonging like this series of outwardly concentric circles where we keep expanding our “sphere of belonging” further and further outwards from the center. Or to use the essential divisions in his book, presence on one hand (enclosure) and communion on the other (threshhold).

I’ve been thinking about this on the first Sunday of Advent. What does it mean to be at home in this world and to simltaneously find ourselves longing for another. At the heart of Advent is this notion of waiting. In a tradition sense Advent is born from this notion of waiting in this inbetween space between a world into which Jesus has come and the world in which Jesus promises to return. It is, in this sense, about the ways in which the story of Israel, caught up as it becomes into the story of the Christ-child, informs our own anticipation of a second advent today. We are entering into a patterned way of life and way of being.

And what is the dominant motif that informs the story of Israel? Exile. This sense in which we find this conversation between home on one side (Jerusalem) and the world on the other (an Israel that has been assimilated into the nations). That Jesus’ home becomes the threshhold of the spirits movement into the world sits at the heart of our own way of seeing the places in which we live. To belong somwhere is to always be standing on the threshhold of that anticipated movement of the spirit out into the world. We do not contain the Christ-child into our enclosures, for as relevant and as necessary as our built traditions are to our sense of belonging somewhere. To do so is to miss Jesus altogether, and thus to have our protected and preserved sense of belonging uprooted by the world breaking in from the outiside. To see this enclosure as a threshhold is to see the way in which Jesus is at work in the world.

This, I think is an important aspect of the Christmas celebration. In creating and building a home in our enclosed section of the world around Jesus, we can then learn what it means to anticipate Christ’s act of bringing heaven (His home) to earth.